Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture

Laurie Hanquinet, Mike Savage, Laurie Hanquinet, Mike Savage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781135008888
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge Handbook of the Sociology of Arts and Culture offers a comprehensive overview of sociology of art and culture, focusing especially – though not exclusively – on the visual arts, literature, music, and digital culture. Extending, and critiquing, Bourdieu's influential analysis of cultural capital, the distinguished international contributors explore the extent to which cultural omnivorousness has eclipsed highbrow culture, the role of age, gender and class on cultural practices, the character of aesthetic preferences, the contemporary significance of screen culture, and the restructuring of popular culture. The Handbook critiques modes of sociological determinism in which cultural engagement is seen as the simple product of the educated middle classes. The contributions explore the critique of Eurocentrism and the global and cosmopolitan dimensions of cultural life. The book focuses particularly on bringing cutting edge 'relational' research methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative, to bear on these debates. This handbook not only describes the field, but also proposes an agenda for its development which will command major international interest.

Part 1
Bourdieu’s legacy and new perspectives for the sociology of art and culture

Introduction to Part I

One of the main themes of this handbook is to explore the implications of Bourdieu’s work to the sociology of art and culture and to position his thinking against rival approaches. In some respects, Bourdieu’s importance hardly needs emphasis. His account of French lifestyles and cultural taste in Distinction (1984) is one of the single most important monographs written in post-war sociology anywhere in the world. In emphasizing what he terms ‘the social critique of the judgement of taste’, Bourdieu fundamentally affirmed the ways in which art was implicated in the making and contesting of social relationships more widely. His fundamental move was to take the ‘pure’ aesthetic judgement not on its own terms – as a claim about universal standards of taste and value – but as embodying forms of privilege which precisely through lifting value out of its context thus empowers those with the capacity to be distant from the world of everyday necessity. Through this deft manoeuvre, the work of artists (and intellectuals more generally) is seen as exhibiting forms of cultural capital which are complicit with privilege and power. His arguments can thus be deeply unsettling to those working in the cultural sector, as well as to those schooled in the humanities disciplines, which can from within this purview, be seen to be implicated in cultural capital itself.

It is not the aim of any of our chapters to provide introductions to the way in which Bourdieu extends this thinking in the numerous fields in which he was interested. We assume that many readers will have some acquaintanceship with his ideas, and those who wish to find a good recent account may want to read the first chapter of Bennett et al.’s Culture, Class, Distinction (2009), or refer to the edited collections by Silva and Warde (2012) or Coulangeon and Duval (2014). Our main concern in this handbook is to unpack the Bourdieusian legacy so that readers can identify the relational and aesthetic potential of his thinking more directly. It should be noted at the outset that Bourdieu is a figure who excites both negative and positive passions which can lead to his thought being simplified and made more unitary than it actually is. Thus, the concept of cultural capital has been extensively reviled by those seeing it as reductive, simplistic or as denying agency and creativity. There is certainly no doubt – as we shall see shortly – that the concept can be used in a rather simplistic way – for instance by identifying it as coterminous with particular ‘highbrow’ tastes such as for the opera; however, our intention is to encourage a realization that there is much more to Bourdieu’s thinking than this.

Our approach in this handbook is therefore not to pigeonhole a ‘true’ Bourdieu (to either criticize or praise), but to use his thinking as a resource to advance the research agenda today – and in a context which is very different to that in which he conducted his own research for Distinction fifty years ago. Rather than seeking to exemplify the arguments which Bourdieu made in Distinction through arguing that ‘nothing has changed’, it is ultimately more in keeping with his own historically oriented way of thinking to see how his approach can allow new insights to be generated.

Bourdieu and cultural sociology

The first section focuses directly on the significance of Bourdieu’s thinking, originally in the French context but also more widely in terms of his role within cultural sociology. We start by reflecting on how Bourdieu has influenced French debate, both within the academy and beyond. Coulangeon’s chapter offers a systematic account of how, in his native context, Bourdieu’s thinking fed into cultural policy and politics through providing a distinctive account of the cleavages in cultural engagement. By bringing out the significance of politics in the French context, we can immediately identify a difference from his reception elsewhere, for the obvious reason that Bourdieu and his followers were not the kind of highly visible political agents elsewhere that they were in France. But Coulangeon also explores how Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital has always been contested even within France, notably through the work of Bernard Lahire who disputed the extent to which individuals had coherent cultural practices as one might expect if there were cohesive forms of ‘highbrow’ culture¹. The irony, therefore, is that in his own French heartland, Bourdieu’s conception of cultural capital, as it applies to the organization of taste, practices and lifestyles, is highly contested and little pursued in research in this area.

Within the French tradition, Bourdieu’s work on production figures at least as strongly as that on consumption, but this is completely different to his reception in the Anglophone world. In the UK, as well as in Australia, Bourdieu’s work was mainly appropriated through academics working in cultural studies, especially those influenced by debates about cultural consumption. Thus, from the 1980s, Mike Featherstone (1985), Scott Lash and John Urry (1987), Alan Warde (1997) and others all used Bourdieu to elaborate new concepts of lifestyle and consumption as part of their endeavours to show these areas of sociological exploration had previously been under-developed. The result here is that Bourdieu’s interest in production and in intermediation was relatively little used, whereas his accounts of lifestyle and consumption – which were highly contested within France, as Coulangeon discusses – proved much more influential. This is the reason why in the second part of this handbook we deliberately introduce reflections on production and mediation to redress this imbalance and show recent changes in the Anglophone reception of Bourdieu’s work.

The other contributions to this section are important for situating Bourdieu’s contribution more broadly in global perspective so that its potential advantages and disadvantages become clear. Santoro and Solaroli offer the most engaged critique of the thinking of the American cultural sociologist Jeffrey Alexander that is currently available. This is an important paper since Alexander is one of Bourdieu’s most vociferous critics and is responsible for the elaboration of the ‘strong programme’ of cultural sociology which might be seen as intellectual rival. Santoro and Solaroli demonstrate powerfully the weakness of Alexander’s criticism of Bourdieu (as well as of the wider ‘strong program’) and argue that the two intellectual projects – Bourdieusian sociology and the so called ‘strong program’ – might be reframed as reciprocally reinforcing perspectives towards a more comprehensive and effective (and thus truly ‘stronger’) platform for the sociology of art and culture. We see this paper as a vital underpinning for the broader arguments of this handbook.

Beljean, Chong and Lamont also show the potential of Bourdieu’s thinking to inform new areas of research even though his specific claims – about valuation in their case – may be criticized. They show how his specific, possibly reductive, approach towards valuation, which he elaborates in the French context, can be opened out to provide a wider ranging perspective, incorporating insights from intellectual traditions – such as pragmatism, science studies, and organisational sociology – which may appear to be alien to Bourdieu’s thinking in his specific French context.

This first set of papers thus both situates Bourdieu’s original contribution in his French context and also considers how it relates to cultural sociology more broadly. We see (from Beljean, Chong and Lamont) how Bourdieu’s thinking can be adapted for broader projects around questions of valuation and (from Santoro and Solaroli) how it compares favourably with Alexander’s strong programme.

The omnivore debate

The second section turns directly to the ‘omnivore debate’. This may appear a rather narrow argument, exploring whether the better educated and more privileged classes are attracted towards plural rather than ‘highbrow’ tastes, but these chapters show that this seemingly specialized interest has actually become the lightning conductor for a number of orienting concerns in the sociology of art and culture. This is due to the way that the omnivore concept has lent itself to strategies for quantification as researchers measure the range and character of people’s tastes using survey data. The omnivore debate was originated in the early 1990s by Richard Peterson, one of the most important American quantitative sociologists examining culture, almost as an aside, but has become a major research industry in its own right. The debate thus allowed Bourdieu’s thinking to be introduced into ‘mainstream’ American sociology, and as Karademir Hazır and Warde show, the popularization of the concept of the cultural omnivore has come to have huge provenance in debates across the world.

Peterson’s work is important because the omnivore concept allowed the quantification of cultural taste using data from numerous national surveys. Unlike the very rich and complex material on cultural taste used in Bourdieu’s studies in France, most national surveys, especially those in the US, tended to contain only a few questions asking about preferential taste for specific genres of (mainly) music. The relative paucity of questions on cultural and aesthetic tastes made it challenging to say much of sociological interest by analyzing them. Peterson’s important innovation here was to examine the extent to which people’s tastes crossed the boundaries between what could be deemed to be ‘highbrow’ (for instance, classical music), ‘middlebrow’ (for instance, gospel music) and ‘lowbrow’ (for instance, rock music). Using this quite simple but deft approach, quantification becomes possible, and Bourdieu could be used as an intellectual foil that provided the ‘null hypothesis’ against which the omnivore thesis could launch itself. Thus, by showing that large numbers of well-educated people do not appear to have cohesive highbrow tastes as Bourdieu might think, but that they in fact range across a set of high, medium and low brow genres, the apparently banal finding that people have complex tastes was seen as a matter of interest because it was taken to refute the view that a distinctive kind of cultural capital existed.

Karademir Hazır and Warde show, sympathetically, how the omnivore debate has been so influential within the sociology of art and culture by extending methodological approaches and developing more sophisticated ways of thinking. Gayo’s analysis of the omnivore concept, on the other hand, reviews how it has been received, especially within the South American context, in order to point to some of its limitations which become even more apparent when translated outside their native context.

However, Karademir and Warde show that the concept of the omnivore can be used productively to examine important issues, and it would be much too crude to dismiss it. We can see examples of this more creative approach in chapters from this handbook, such as those by Lizardo and Skiles and by Reeves, which show also how the omnivore itself can become a foil around which more sophisticated forms of thinking can be mounted, including those more sympathetic to Bourdieu’s thinking. Here, rather than the omnivore being reified as a distinctive social ‘type’, the concept is seen to pose issues about the wider dynamics of cultural taste and participation. Both of these explore what has become one of the central issues, the role of age, generation and time more generally, in shaping the consumption of art and culture. This is an area where Bourdieu said relatively little, though research in the recent past has come to recognize this as a major divide, with younger generations having distinctive cultural profiles compared to older ones. Lizardo and Skiles, Reeves and Reeves in different ways, point to the prospects that more sophisticated strategies for quantification will allow the omnivore concept to be broken down into more telling and discrete categories, especially in ways which are more sensitive to questions of temporality.

Relational approaches to the sociology of art and culture

The final section opens up this discussion still further to reflect on the potential of ‘relational approaches’ within the sociology of art and culture. The argument that sociology needs to be relational has now been in existence for twenty years, being elaborated with particular force by Emirbayer (1997). We have discussed in the introduction to our book why we see this as a powerful mode for animating current debates in the area. A growing current of relational modes of thinking can be traced especially in American sociology, and we see these as very exciting and having great potential. This is partly because of the way that they articulate theoretical, substantive and methodological debates.

A feature of ‘relationalism’ is its potential to be associated to wider theoretical perspectives which resist positivist and linear perspectives, and Lévi-Martin and Merriman explore the nature of field analysis itself. They bring out how Bourdieu’s use of field analysis goes beyond invoking the aesthetic simply as a particular part of the field and extends to the very organization of the field itself. In this respect, we can see how one of our main aims of this handbook is exemplified within this current of post-Bourdieusian thinking. The power of the field concept also comes out in numerous other papers in this handbook (and see also Savage and Silva 2013).

Our interest in relationality is also associated with important methodological arguments within sociology. Much of the analysis within the ‘omnivore’ literature uses conventional linear quantitative methods, such as regression models. There are, however, forms of quantitative analysis which do not seek to model discrete ‘dependent variables’ (such as the ‘omnivore’) but instead are interested in exploring the nature of relationships within a complex data set so that pattern of relationships can be delineated within it. Such approaches avoid one of the main criticisms of quantitative analyses of art and culture: that they seek to reduce measures of culture to simple or discrete variables that are thereby bound to be too crude to be meaningful.

Lena’s paper is an important intervention which points to the limits of using ‘genre’ questions in cultural sociology. Her argument is crucial since genre questions are nearly invariably the focus of attention within the omnivore debate. Lena shows the problems of relying on genre questions and shows the power of using structural studies from anthropology and sociology to do more justice to the meaning of cultural works, and in particular to bring out their relational qualities.

Lena’s analysis links to the paper by Rule and Bearman, who further reflect on the role of network thinking for developing relational research strategies. ...